Lost and Found (18 page)

"What else are we going to talk about?"

He grunted before settling back against the ledge. It was almost dawn, with no sign
of movement from the two lookouts or the relief pair that Drake said would show up
soon. I had to pee, but for some reason was embarrassed to do so on the roof of a
building.

"About a mile from here. South of the house," he said.

"In the neighborhood?"

"Yeah, why?" He handed me a baggy full of orange slices and I took it from him.

"What were they doing out there?" I sucked some juice from a slice of fruit while
Drake fidgeted uncomfortably.

"I don't know. Scoping out the area, probably."

"What happened after? Did the others come looking for them?"

"I don't know, Riley. I just dragged their bodies into a nearby house and split. Like
I said before, it was sort of unplanned, you know?"

He bit into his orange slice just as the sky paled in the east. The sun was coming.
When I couldn't hold it any longer, I mentioned I had to use the restroom and Drake
gave me directions to the closest bathroom on the level below us. Most of the floor
was pitch black, since the windows of the office building didn't reach the inner rooms.
Thankfully, the bathroom was unlocked. After shining my light around the small space,
I used the first stall and rushed back up the stairs to the roof just in time to see
that part of the sky and a handful of clouds were dyed with a lavender coloring.

"Oh wow, that's beautiful," I said.

"Quiet!" Drake hissed, and I immediately dropped to the ground, afraid I had blown
our cover in some way.

After crawling through the loose gravel to where he was flattened against the ledge,
I reached into my pack and pulled out my pocket scope. I didn't hear anything - no
voices or walkie-talkies or birds or insects. Just air as it flew over my head, nearly
one hundred feet above the ground.

"Look," he said, pointing to the second lookout's rooftop, "I saw another guy over
there, but not sure where he went."

"So there's three of them?"

"Hold on a second…do you see that?"

I shoved the scope against my eye and followed his line of sight in between the two
glass buildings until I saw movement on the trail. There was definitely someone walking
alongside the golf course. Neither of the lookouts seemed alarmed, but both stood
with their rifles, glancing up and down the riverbed.

"They're looking for something," I said quietly.

"Yeah, but what?"

"Or
who
."

We watched until the man was out of our view, following the curve of the land below
to the west. He was also armed, but it was hard to tell what he looked like beneath
a bundled up coat and thickly lined bomber hat.

Nearly an hour passed and the sun was fully awake by the time the same man returned,
but this time he came up the streets, walking an almost identical path as the one
we had taken. He entered the first glass building and Drake snatched his bag off the
ground and crawled toward the door.

"Come on, we have to get off the roof," he said over his shoulder.

"Is something wrong?" I crawled behind him, my pack slung over only one shoulder so
it dragged along the gravel.

"The windows downstairs are tinted, now that it's daytime, the roof is too exposed."

Once we were inside the stairwell, Drake ran down the steps to the same floor with
the bathroom I had just used, practically running down the narrow hallway to the south
facing offices with windows. He found one that seemed to be just below where we were
on the roof and pulled a desk up against the window. After some rearranging, he had
two chairs in front of the desk, both raised to their highest points.

"There," he said. With a thump, he tossed his pack onto the table and sat in the chair,
resting his boots on the desk and hooking his fingers behind his head.

"Okay, now what?" I sat stiffly in the empty chair beside him, too uneasy to get comfortable.

"Now we wait again to see who goes and who stays."

"For how long?" I wiggled in the chair, my behind glad for the cushioning.

"For as long as it takes or until one of them is on his own."

I turned to look at his profile. His rugged face was almost perfectly shaped. He had
a straight nose, with a slightly rounded end, a square jaw that evoked a kind of strength,
thick eyebrows, and lips that seemed to have been stenciled on his mouth. He was the
kind of handsome most women would swoon over only to have their hearts broken, but
when I looked at him, I wanted to see Connor's blue eyes staring back at me, not Drake's
hazel-green ones.

With a gulp, I swallowed the lump in my throat before speaking. "And if one of them
heads off on his own…then what?"

He finally turned to look at me, his eyes cold and hard with determination. My body
betrayed my mind and I had to force myself not to look away from him even as my cheeks
flushed at the way he stared me down.

"Then we strike."

We got lucky.

The year I turned twenty my cat jumped out of our second story apartment after the
kitchen window was left open. She pushed the screen off and dropped to the ground
like a stone, landing on all fours as a cat should, but the momentum smashed her face
into the concrete, chipping three teeth and scraping her chin. She was otherwise unscathed.
A week later, I was still picking gravel out of her skin. I swore that she cashed
in at least one of her nine lives that day. Luck had been on her side. Sometimes luck
is funny that way.

When the night watchmen left their glass towers an hour after daylight arrived, they
headed off in the same direction, going north toward where Drake said the warehouse
was, instead of east or west where the houses fanned out toward the horizon. This
left only one lookout. It was the opportunity we hoped for.

It took nearly a minute to sprint across the parking lot of our building, cross the
street and rush into the lobby of the glass structure. We ran straight up the stairs,
stopping at the top only to catch our breath. The door to the roof was propped open
with a medical book of some kind, thicker than any book really needed to be, letting
in a spray of sunshine against the staircase. The air from outside was warm and dry
and if our adrenaline wasn't coursing through our veins like a drug, we might have
noticed it was too quiet on the roof.

Armed with our knives in hand, we eased outside and stepped onto the roof. Quickly
sliding around the wall to the right in an attempt to dart behind the small roof access
door, but instead we came face to face with the man we were trying to sneak up on.
Drake was immediately knocked backwards into me, the force slamming us both against
the wall.

With a grunt, Drake brought his fist up into the shorter man's jaw, forcing him back
a step. The glint of metal reflected off the bright white flooring of the roof as
the man lifted his sniper rifle up with one hand and grabbed at his bleeding mouth
with the other. We both rushed him at the same time, Drake from the front, me from
the side. The collision nearly toppled all three of us to the ground. The man fought
back but Drake was larger, stronger and angrier, and slammed the rifle into the stunned
lookout's face, simultaneously breaking his nose with a sickening crunch and splitting
an eyebrow open. At the same time, I thrust my knife into the man's side, twisting
it under his ribs before jerking upwards.

The man's face paled instantly and his last exhale of air was full of bloodied bubbles
before he fell to his knees. With an almost comically slow lean, he went down on his
left side, arms and head limp.
Seconds.
It only took seconds to kill an armed man and took even less time for him to die.
My first thought was how lucky we were. Mentally I ticked off how many lives I would
have left if I were a cat. No doubt I had used up half of them just in the last year.

"Jesus," I rasped. I was terrified, but unable to look away from the dead man's face.
My pulse throbbed in my ears, making a
whoosh-whoosh-whoosh
sound that reminded me of a helicopter that you know is nearby but can't quite find
in the sky before the sound is gone.

"See, nothing to it," Drake said. Large beads of sweat stood out on his forehead as
he blew out a loud breath, kicking the man's leg. "He's a goner."

"Obviously," I said, trying my hardest not to sway.
I will not faint, I will not faint, I will NOT faint.
I had to say it in my head over and over until I was certain I would stay conscious.
It was not the first time I took a life but it
was
the first time I took a life in cold blood. It wasn't really cold blood though, not
really, because I knew it was that man's job to shoot down anyone he saw. He could
have very well been the one that put two bullets in me just a few weeks before.

Even though I tried to convince the darkest part of my being that he deserved it,
all I saw when I looked down at him was a man. A Hispanic man with short brown hair
and pale eyes. He was dressed in jeans a size too big, his thin frame practically
swallowed up in layered shirts. Nothing about his face seemed menacing or dangerous.
Plus, he couldn't have been over twenty-five.

And then my eyes settled on the rifle near his hand, the same one he pointed at Drake
just moments before. The one he would have used on me, given the chance. That dark
corner inside my heart grew a teeny bit bigger and I forced myself to look away with
dry eyes. It was done. It was over. This was what I wanted, wasn't it?
To make them pay.

"We should move him, dump him in a room downstairs or something," Drake said, picking
up the rifle and slinging it over his shoulder. He'd obviously handled one before.

"Why bother? The next guy to come up here is going to see the blood right away," I
said with a sigh.

"No body will mean questions. Right now we don't want the rest of them out looking
for us, not if you want to follow the next pair back to their
lair
," he said sarcastically, bending down to hoist the dead man's shoulders off the ground.
"Grab his feet, it won't take long."

The man's ankles were still warm when I wrapped my fingers around his legs, lifting
when Drake did. Dead weight was heavy and though the guy wasn't much taller than I
was, it was still a struggle to get him down the first flight of stairs without dropping
his corpse every foot or so. His coat held most of the blood from his side, but a
few drops still decorated the steps and hall. Drake shoved the body into a closet
on the fourth floor and used a rag to wipe off the stairs leading to the roof.

He shrugged at my confused look. "This buys us a little time. The others won't know
what happened, at least not right away."

As we hurried down the rest of the stairs with our packs bumping against our tailbones,
I got a whiff of something antiseptic in the staircase. Just short of the first floor,
I stopped on the steps and inhaled deeply.

"Drake, wait," I warned, "Do you smell that?"

Two steps from the bottom, he stopped and turned to look up at me, "What?"

"It smells like medicine in here."

"It's a damn medical office building. Why does that surprise you?"

"Because this smell…it wasn't here before." Even after waving the air around my face,
the odor didn't fade.

"Riley, let's go," he said impatiently. He slapped his palm against the wall in irritation,
lowering his foot down one more step. From where he stood, he was able to see out
the door into the lobby.

"Drake, wait-"

The glass from the lobby door blew inward and showered down around him. With a startled
cry, I fell backwards on the step, landing hard on my ass as Drake dove to the ground
and flattened himself onto the tile. Another series of short bursts ripped through
the door and it took me a second to register the fact that we were being shot at from
at least one person in the lobby.

"Stay there!" I shouted down to Drake, who had nowhere to go but into a narrow corner.
He filled the small space at the bottom of the steps with his frame, his boots skidding
and squeaking along the tile as he pushed his body as far into the wall as it would
go. He sat on the ground, legs drawn up, grabbing for his knife.

I scrambled up the top steps and around the turn point of the railing, fumbling with
my pack zipper the whole time. Once open, I thrust a hand in, pushing aside granola
bar wrappers and water bottles until my fingers settled on the cool grip of my loaded
pistol.

With my finger pressed to my lips, I signaled for Drake to stay quiet. Eventually
whoever was in the lobby was going to get close enough to the door to open it and
when he did, I'd have a straight shot down the stair case to his head. All I had to
do was wait.

Seconds ticked by. Minutes passed. Hours could have come and gone before we heard
the crunch of a shoe on broken glass. I held my breath with one shaky hand pointed
at the door. Drake nodded from below, still pinned in the corner at the bottom of
the stairs, unable to see into the lobby area. I stretched out on my stomach, exposing
only my head and arms and saw the first peek of a tennis shoe come into view before
quickly vanishing with a squeak.

"Romero, come in," a high-pitched male voice boomed below us. The sound of static
from a walkie-talkie answered him.

"Romero! Pick up the fucking radio, bro!" Another click...More gravelly silence.
"Shit! Shit!"

Something large and metallic made a bouncing sound before coming to a stop against
a wall.
A trashcan maybe?
Another squeak of a tennis shoe echoed in the lobby, followed by mumbled cursing.

"Are you dead in there, mother fucker?" the man screamed into the stairwell.

I held my breath, waiting for him to walk into my line of sight again. I only needed
one good shot.
Just one.
Shoes squeaked and the large metal object bounced along the lobby floor again.

"I saw you assholes! I saw you run across the street, stupid
shits
!" he wailed.

Damn.
There wasn't anyone on the other rooftop, but that didn't mean there wasn't someone
inside
the building. I suddenly felt like an idiot. Drake was still squatted in his corner,
the gun held less than an inch from his nose but his eyes closed momentarily while
he pressed the barrel against his slick forehead. Obviously, he was feeling just as
much the moron as I was at the moment.

"You fucks dead in there, or what?" the man screamed again.

I wanted to laugh. As if, we'd actually answer him either way.

The clean white shoe came back, followed by another. A pair of loose jeans came into
view then a shiny metal buckle followed by a yellow sweatshirt that poked out beneath
a puffy coat the color of coal. My breath froze in my throat when I saw his elbow.
A few more inches to the right and I'd have a clear shot of his chest. But he stopped
and fired several more rounds at the stairs. One of the bullets ricocheted off the
metal railing and whizzed by my head close enough to move my hair.

One more fucking inch.

Finally, he leaned toward the door to peer into the rectangular space where the window
had been, and there it was - the front left pocket of his coat. My finger squeezed
the trigger twice, the bullets lodging square into his chest. Like in an action movie,
his arms and legs flew up into the air as he was catapulted backwards, as if a giant
had punched him in the gut.

Drake jumped up from his corner and kicked the door open, firing freely into the lobby.
Something shattered, but the only person inside the open space was bleeding out on
the shiny lobby floor, staining the expensive white marble a rich cabernet shade.
Drake kicked the gun out of his hands and it spiraled across the tiled floor, coming
to a stop with a loud clunk sound after hitting the base of the check-in counter.

As I stepped out of the stairwell and into the much brighter room, the boy, barely
out of his teen years, stuttered one blood-bubbly word before his head lolled to the
side and the light went out of his chocolate brown eyes,
"F-fuckers."

***

Two men. I had killed two men in the span of ten minutes. Who…what had I become?

"Did you hear me…Riley?!" Drake shouted in my ear, pulling hard on my right arm, "I
said we gotta get the hell out of here!"

With a yank, he pulled me away from the impressive blood pool already forming beneath
the body, and pushed me out of the glass lobby door that Drake had managed to completely
shatter with his wild shooting from the stairwell. Our feet were still crunching on
the glass a good twenty feet from the entryway.

"Huh?" I finally asked when we were half a block away, running down the deserted and
cold street. I looked over my shoulder at the glass building and it stared back at
me, sad and damaged from our brief shootout.

"Jesus-FUCK!" Drake hissed, still pulling me by my arm. "Damn, that was close! We
gotta move fast - they'll hear those shots for sure."

Words finally found their way from my blank mind to my numb mouth, "Wh-where are we
going?" I fought the urge to upchuck all over Drake's side at the juvenile and vulnerable
tone of my voice.

I will not cry, I will not cry, I WILL NOT CRY!

"Damn, woman. You weren't kidding, were you?" He glanced over his shoulder, his hand
still attached to me. I was surprised when I looked down to see that he was actually
holding my hand.

"What?"

"That you know how to take care of yourself," he said with a manic grin. I didn't
like it. I imagined his face held together from the inside by scotch-tape and that
if he grinned like that hard enough, the tape would tear away and he would become
nothing but cracks and bloody gashes. He was gripping my hand too hard for me to pull
it free, even though I jerked my arm several times.

"They're dead?" It came out a question, though I knew it was a fact. Two men, their
bodies leaking out the blood they spent the last year trying to keep inside their
bodies.